The Rope Walk (19 page)

She was not hungry, but she picked up her spoon and began to eat automatically. Elizabeth did not tolerate wasted food. Whatever you didn't finish at one meal would be taken away without comment but then invariably served to you at the next. Sometimes it was far worse the second time around, and Alice had learned to clear her plate. The table was still cluttered with the dishes from the boys’ breakfast, the Blue Willow butter dish, a honey pot with the twisted silver spoon, the sugar bowl with the lid on which a small blushing shepherdess held her chipped skirts coyly in one hand, her crook in the other. Wally had stubbed out a cigarette in a little glass ashtray beside his plate.

She was halfway through the oatmeal when she remembered Theo. She hadn't even looked to see if he was still in bed when she'd gotten up. Alice pushed back her chair and took the stairs two at a time.

His bed was empty, his toolbox gone. The morning had been full of vanishings; she imagined the worst.

She came back downstairs and stood stricken in the doorway of the kitchen.

“He's gone
,” she said to Elizabeth.

He had run away, she thought, or O'Brien had arranged for him to be taken home. Everything today had happened while she had been asleep, as if she had been under the influence of a potion that weighted her limbs and her mind, pinning her to the sheets
like a stone. Ever since her birthday, she realized, she had overslept in the mornings, as if her own internal clock had stopped functioning. She felt betrayed by herself, disgusted by this new person who missed the early morning hours she had always loved, who slept through conversations when significant decisions were made. For a moment she remembered her vertiginous flying dream, when she had pitched through rents in the cloud toward the ground. She was afraid she would cry.

Elizabeth turned around from the sink in surprise. “Who? Your friend Mr. Crazy Theo?”

Alice nodded.

“No, he's not gone.” Elizabeth turned back to her dishes. “He wasjust up early. He's down at the river, playing.”

Alice sagged with relief against the door frame. How strange that she felt like crying again. She seemed to be crying all the time now, she thought.

“Go on, hurry up. Finish your breakfast,” Elizabeth said. “Then you can go find him. Also, Archie talked to Mr. Fitzgerald this morning on the telephone. You two are supposed to go over there after lunch today.”

Alice took the path into the woods that she had taken with Theo two days before when they had walked to the Fitzgeralds’, reasoning that he knew that route and would have taken it again. Also, he'd been particularly pleased with one of the little islands, wanting to build a camp there. Alice ran through the trees toward the sound of the river, jumping over fallen branches. She saw Theo—or saw the red stripes of his T-shirt—as she came out of the woods onto the bank of the river. He was upstream perhaps a hundred yards away, down by the water's edge.

When she drew near he looked up at the sound of her clattering
over the stones and stood up, waving excitedly. At his happy greeting, Alice felt the morning's grief slide away from her. The river ran along beside her, the air cool and clean. The sluggishness that had kept her in bed these last two mornings seemed to float free; she felt as if she were coming back to herself, flowing eagerly into her fingers and toes, pushing up like rising sap against the bones of her shoulders and the brace of her collarbone, all the way to the top of her head and then down against the soles of her feet with a boundless, glad energy. She ran toward Theo, leaping from rock to jagged rock and over the crevasses between boulders, her arms held out for balance.

They spent all morning by the river, laboriously carrying stones from the water's edge up to the grassy shelf of the island for the foundation of a fort. Theo had made astonishing progress on his own, industriously dragging fallen branches that would form the roof into a heap by the low beginning of the stone walls. Alice had never imagined such an ambitious fort. The island jutted into the river, siphoning off a narrow stream that ran down a curving rocky channel under the trees and divided the island from the shore. Theo had positioned the fort at the tip of the island, its bowed front facing the oncoming water with a good view upstream. He had left room for a door, an opening in the rocks spacious enough for the two of them to sit side by side, that looked upstream. Already the walls were eight inches high, the stones fitted neatly against one another.

While they hauled rocks up to the site, Theo explained how the fort would look when it was finished, with a central beam, and branches laid like an airplane's dramatic wing across the top to create a broad overhang, providing shelter from the rain for the wood supply he envisioned. “We'll need some kind of a skin for the door,” he told her, panting, as they struggled up the bank
with their rocks. “Do you know if there's a bear skin anywhere around here?”

Alice staggered behind him under the weight of a long flat rock. “A
what?”
she said. She was learning that, to Theo, the world was irrational, even absurd, a place both perilously flawed—where your own grandfather could fail to love you— and at the same time rich with possibility: rivers to be followed to the sea, strange bear skins just lying around for the taking, for instance. Whatever caution other children possessed, whatever caution she herself possessed, seemed shrinking and cowardly beside Theo's conviction, the tireless work of his imagination. Here he was, separated from his mother and father, abandoned by his grandparents to whom he had been entrusted, staying with strangers, without any of the familiars of home on which Alice knew she herself depended for comfort and strength. And yet he was awake early, launched out into the daylight, into work, into purpose and pleasure, busy and untroubled. She thought she knew enough to say that there weren't any bearskins around, but that certainty gave her a sorry feeling, not a superior one.

“If there's bear hunting here, a hunter might shoot a bear and skin it and just take the meat,” Theo said. “If you don't take the meat, it's immoral to kill the bear just for fun. Bear skins smell terrible, though, and it's almost impossible to get the smell out, so sometimes peoplejust leave them.”

How did he know these things? Alice wondered. She reached the top of the bank and dropped the rock near the others. Her arms, from straining at their sockets while she was holding the rock, now wanted to float upward of their own accord, light and airy as feathers. It was true that there were bears sighted from time to time in Grange, she thought, mostly upending the garbage cans behind Rita and Barrett's store. She'd heard it speculated
that the same bear came down from the mountain every now and then, remembering the rich leavings of the store's garbage.

“What do they smell like?” she asked. “Bear skins.” “I forget,” Theo said, bending over to move her rock into place. “Really bad cat pee or something. I saw a show about it on TV.” He stood back and appraised the fort. “This is going to be great,” he said, and glanced over at her, expecting confirmation. It was great, she thought, taking a deep breath and looking around. It was the best fort she had ever seen.

After lunch, they decided to walk to the Fitzgeralds’ by way of the river and have another look at their fort. It was hard to leave it, but they were both eager to visit Kenneth, to see how he was after his fall and to thank him for the mobiles. They began walking upstream, hopping from rock to rock, talking about improvements to their camp.

At one point, Theo stopped, listening. Behind him, Alice almost collided with him and nearly lost her balance; she put her hands on his shoulders, steadying herself.

“Is that a waterfall?” he said. “That sounds just like a waterfall.”

Alice teetered behind him on the rock. She clutched at Theo's shirt for a moment and righted herself. She felt a flicker of unease. “We're not allowed to go there,” she said.

Theo turned around to regard her with interest. “How big is it?”

Alice knew she didn't know exactly how high the falls into Indian Love Call were. “As high as the roof maybe,” she guessed, reluctant.

“Of your
house?”
Theo sounded impressed.

“They're dangerous. Archie says so,” Alice said. She began to march off the rocks and scramble for a handhold up the bank. The river had already started to narrow here. The banks were higher, pitted with holes and twisted with tree roots. The water, with its happy conversational rills and ripples further downstream, sounded more urgent, deeper and faster.

“Why can't we go? We won't go
in
them,” Theo said patiently, as if such an idea were idiotic anyway. “Let's just go
see
them.”

Alice reached the top of the bank and turned around. The falls weren't far, she judged, though in the summer, with the trees in leaf, the sound was muffled. It was easier in winter to hear the water pouring down into the dark pool, easier to feel chilled by the powerful sound of it.

“C'mon,” he said. “It won't hurt just to see them. Do you know how big Niagara Falls are? A woman went over them in a barrel. She was a teacher, and she went in a
dress
. She didn't even take her shoes off. I saw it on TV. She was perfectly fine.”

Alice looked down at him. He teetered on a rock below her, holding out his arms for balance. “Oops!” he said. And then he clowned around a little, pretending he was falling in.

Alice turned away resolutely. “I'm leaving,” she said.

After a minute, she heard him behind her, scrambling up the bank.

“Behold the conquering heroes.” Kenneth greeted them with a salute from the terrace when they plowed through the tall grass toward him. He was seated in a chair drawn up before an old wooden easel that had been set up on the flagstones. The terrace's awning, a tattered and stained striped canvas, had been unrolled
onto its rusty metal frame, casting an uneven shade. Kenneth wore a bandage circling his head, his face nearly the same deathly white as the gauze wrapping. Under the ripped awning, its scalloped edge torn loose in places and fluttering, Kenneth looked to Alice like a shipwreck survivor, beaten and exhausted.

“My camarilla,” he said, and turned partway in his chair, tossing out his hand to indicate Alice and Theo, addressing someone seated behind him in the shade. Alice hadn't noticed her at first. With her black skin and black dress, the woman seemed to disappear into the shadows. When she opened her mouth and laughed, her body seemed to organize itself around the sound. Her hair was divided into dozens of braided rows tipped with black beads that clicked as she shook her head, smiling. She had a strong neck and open face, eyes like a doe. Her big hands were folded in the wide bowl of her lap. Alice stared at her.

The children climbed up the steps and stood shyly on the terrace in the presence of this visitor.

“I am resurrected,” Kenneth said. He put down the long, thin piece of charcoal he had been holding and set it on the easel. “I understand it was you two who called in the guard and rescued me.” He touched his shirtfront and looked up at Alice. “I think I remember a bird landing on my chest.”

She remembered the feeling of Kenneth's heart under her hand, the weak longing of its beating beneath her fingers, and blushed.

He turned away abruptly. “Miss Sidonnie Roberts,” he said. “Who is about to take her leave of us after valiant service.”

Alice noticed then the suitcase just inside the French doors, the raincoat draped over it.

“Good afternoon,” the woman named Sidonnie said softly. She was a mesmerizing color, the rich deep black of the carved
ebony chess pieces set up on the board in Archie's study. Alice thought of the queen, with her roughly carved crown. Beside this woman, Theo's tawny skin looked sandy. How could both of them be called black? Alice wondered.

“And what have you been doing all this fine morning?” Kenneth said.

Theo, who had been hanging back by the edge of the terrace behind Alice, spoke up. “Building a fort, down by the river,” he said. “Only we need an animal skin for the doorway.”

Sidonnie laughed again.

Kenneth raised his eyebrows. He put his hand to his chin and seemed to be considering the problem. “It's not native, of course,” he said. “But would a zebra skin do?”

A zebra skin! Alice looked at Theo, marveling.

“It's heavy,” Kenneth cautioned. “You'd have to drag it away as though you'd slain it on the plain.”

“That's okay,” Theo said. “I can do it.”

“You have a zebra skin?” Alice thought of the tiger skin stretched out on the floor of Archie's study. She felt sure that Archie would not consider contributing it to the cause of their fort in the woods. She wanted to clarify matters. “It would be for
outside
,” she said.

“Naturally.” Kenneth's eyes seemed to close a little, and his face sagged. With an effort he opened his eyes again. “It seems an entirely fitting purpose. It's in the attic, I think, or somewhere …” He waved his hand at the house behind him.

Just then, a car's horn sounded from the street at the front of the house. Sidonnie got to her feet.

“Your ride,” Kenneth said.

Sidonnie came forward. She bent down over Kenneth, dwarfing him in his chair, and embraced him. His arms, thin as a child's,
came up across her back. For a moment they did not move, Kenneth's face hidden against Sidonnie's shoulder, her eyes closed. Alice looked away.

When Sidonnie stood up, her eyes were wet. “You take care of this man,” she said. She looked at Theo for a moment, her eyes resting on him.

Theo came to stand beside Alice. He looked up at Sidonnie in a straightforward way, his manner courtly. “We will,” he said.

Kenneth reached over to take Sidonnie's hand briefly.
“Lux mundi
,” he said. “Great light of the world, or something like that. You've been wonderful. Thank you, my love.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking down at him. “You know I am.” She turned back to the house, but Theo darted ahead of her. “I'll get your suitcase,” he said. He dragged it over the doorsill and heaved it along the stones. “I can get it,” he said, when she stepped forward to help him.